Chapter 29
Brooke
Brooke stared at her phone for the hundredth time that Sunday afternoon. The text thread with Tyler sat open, their final messages glaring back at her.
She’d made the smart choice. The safe choice. The choice that protected her business and her reputation, and, most importantly, her heart.
So why’d it feel like the worst mistake of her life?
Brooke set the phone down and pulled her knees to her chest. The house was too quiet. Too empty. She’d spent the morning sulking, the afternoon pacing, and now the evening was stretching ahead with nothing to fill it.
If she was smart, she’d go for a run. The doctor had cleared her for easy runs. No speed work yet, just a slow jog to clear her head. But even that felt like too much.
All she really wanted was to wallow in self-pity. No, that wasn’t it. What she wanted was to call Tyler and tell him she’d made a mistake. Better yet, go to his house and beg him to take her back.
But she knew she couldn’t do that. The whole situation gnawed at her. The evidence, the timeline, it all pointed to Tyler, and yet none of it felt right. It was too . . . perfect.
Brooke grabbed her phone and pulled up Joe’s number before she could talk herself out of it.
He answered on the second ring. “Hey, you okay? I heard about last night.”
She shook her head, brushing past the part about last night. Of course he had heard. Everyone probably had. She was surprised her phone hadn’t been buzzing nonstop. “I need your help.”
“With what?”
“I need to know everything about Tyler. Really know it. Not what Adam says, not what the evidence suggests. The actual truth.”
“Brooke— ”
“You’re an investigative journalist. You seem to have contacts on top of contacts. And you just know things. If anyone can figure this out, it’s you.”
“I’ve been looking into it,” Joe said carefully. “You know that. But I’m not sure getting more involved is a good idea.”
“You think I’m not already involved?”
“You are, but this could be different.”
“Why?”
“Because you might not like what we discover.” His voice was gentle but firm. “Can you handle it if Tyler really is guilty? If the evidence is right and your instincts are wrong?”
The question hit hard. Brooke thought about Kelsey. About how wrong she’d been, how her judgment had nearly gotten them all killed. About the pit in her stomach that said maybe this was the same thing happening again.
“I need to know,” she said quietly. “Even if it destroys me. I can’t live with this uncertainty. Besides, I’d rather find out the truth myself than read about it in the paper later.”
Joe was quiet for a long moment. “All right. Come over. We’ll go through everything.”
*****
Joe’s townhouse was small but organized—up to a point, anyway.
It held entirely too much stuff for Brooke’s liking, but she understood it reflected who he was.
Newspaper clippings and printed articles covered one wall.
In the corner, a multi-paneled desktop setup glowed on a narrow table, looking like the command center of a one-man newsroom.
His laptop sat open on the coffee table, multiple tabs crowding the screen.
“Want something to drink?” he asked. “Coke? I also have iced tea.”
“Coke is great,” she said.
He brought them each a can of soda and motioned to the couch. “I have some things already queued on the laptop for us.”
“You’ve been busy,” Brooke said, settling onto the couch.
“I’ve been working on this off and on since you found Sheila’s remains.” Joe grabbed a notebook from the desk. “The thing about murder investigations is that they’re built on timelines. Who was where and when. What they were doing. Who can verify it.”
“And Tyler’s timeline doesn’t look good.”
“It leaves questions.” Joe flipped open the notebook. “Let’s go through it. Not assuming anything. Just looking at facts.”
He started with Sheila. First detailing how she moved to Irma as a young girl, her dad taking a job with an oil company based in Basin County, overseeing operations in northwest Wyoming.
She attended Irma schools from kindergarten through her high school graduation. Around the time Sheila entered middle school, her dad lost his job. There was some talk of wrongdoing on his part, possibly embezzlement of company funds, but nothing further came of it past rumors.
“The Irma grapevine,” Brooke said. “It’s always been strong.”
“Yep. I reached out to a few people I know who are around the same age as Sheila’s dad.
Got a lot more info than the little bit the newspaper ran with.
Her dad had a rough patch. Couldn’t find work for about eighteen months.
Sheila’s mom waitressed and took odd jobs.
I’m sure it was a difficult time for the family. ”
Joe shared a few more things about Sheila’s adolescent years, including how her dad eventually found a job and things seemed to return to normal for the family.
“After graduating from Irma High School, she went to Casper for college. Sometime during those first months, she met her first husband, Shane Jenkins. They were married in mid-December, and she didn’t return to college after winter break.” Joe flipped the page.
“Like her dad, Shane worked for an oil company, but instead of being upper management, he was a rig worker. Two weeks on, two weeks off. The marriage lasted less than two years. Sheila returned to Irma after the split. She held a variety of jobs and eventually met Rusty Jones. I believe you know Mr. Jones.” Joe paused to meet Brooke’s gaze.
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Don’t remind me.”
“Rusty has a history of his own. Last night wasn’t the first time he’s been in a barroom brawl.”
“We were at a steakhouse. Not exactly the place for brawling.”
“Still . . . He’s been arrested for similar activities before and spent more than one night in the drunk tank. During his marriage to Sheila, the cops responded to noise disturbances several times.”
“Was he hitting her?”
Joe shook his head. “There were never any arrests for domestic violence and no evidence of it happening. A few police reports suggested Sheila may have been the instigator.”
“Sounds like it was a toxic marriage.”
“Indeed. As the marriage neared its end, she started working at the bank. There was some scuttlebutt about her having an affair with her manager, and that’s what led to her divorce from Rusty.
Chances are, she had her sights on Mr. Manager as husband number three, but he took his wife and left town before that happened. ”
Brooke leaned back in her chair. “I remember hearing about that. I had just opened the coffee shop around that time.” She paused as memories of various conversations came back to her. “Wasn’t one of the reasons the bank manager left because Rusty threatened him?”
“Bingo,” Joe said. “He threatened not only the manager but the man’s wife too. He was essentially stalking both of them. Even showing up at a restaurant where they were having dinner.”
She shook her head. “Wow. That sounds very familiar.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“She dated a lot,” Brooke said, trying not to sound too accusatory. Since her death, there had been plenty of rumors about how many people she went out with. “There’s a game warden— ”
“Henry Ayers. He was seeing her earlier in the year. They went to an event at the Elks Lodge for Valentine’s Day and saw each other off and on for a few weeks after.”
“So why isn’t Adam bothering him like he is Tyler?”
Joe shrugged. “Hard telling. But Henry is definitely someone to consider. Back to Sheila. The weekend of her death, she was last seen leaving the bank on Friday evening around six. Security footage showed Tyler at the ATM around the same time. The ATM was at the front of the building, and they could just catch a glimpse of Tyler’s truck in the camera. He’d parked along the curb.”
“Did Sheila go out the door by the ATM? I thought staff used the back door and parked in the lot?”
“That’s right. She went out the side door nearest the employee lot, not the door near the ATM.”
“Do you have footage of her leaving?”
“No, I couldn’t get it.”
“How’d you get this?”
“Better for you not to know.”
She understood Joe had contacts, and maybe not all of them were ones that should be public. “Do you have any other video footage? Showing either Sheila or Tyler?”
“There’re a few things. You know that traffic light on Grand Avenue and Seventh? The one with the camera? There’s footage of both of them going through there. About seven minutes apart. Tyler first, then Sheila.”
“Which proves he didn’t nab her at the bank.”
“Right. He says he played darts that night. I checked at the Watering Hole, but they didn’t have league that night.”
Brooke nodded. “They don’t have darts on Friday nights there now. They play at the Watering Hole on Thursdays. He plays at Bronco Willie’s on Fridays.”
He smiled. “I was going to mention I found that out since we talked last. I asked around. Who knew darts were so popular that they play at different bars on different nights?”
“Anything to pass the time around here.”
“I guess. Anyway, Sheila wasn’t at either of those bars that night. We don’t know where she was. After the stoplight camera, there’s nothing. No one admits to seeing her. Not until . . . ” He tilted his head.
“Not until I found her Sunday morning in a pair of bear caches.” Brooke swallowed hard as the memories of finding Sheila’s body washed over her. “But she wasn’t killed on the mountain. Just left there, right?”
“Yes, the theory is she was killed somewhere else and dumped. The bear saw an opportunity and took it.”
Brooke made a face and shook her head. “Poor Sheila.”
They moved on to Monique. Joe described an early childhood in a small town in Alabama before moving to Irma in the middle of sixth grade to be closer to family.